New Rapture date … and a Protestant problem

  • Well, shucks. The Rap­ture didn’t hap­pen last Sat­ur­day. As I told Word­Mama, I’m kind of relieved to hear it, actu­ally. What if the Rap­ture DID hap­pen, and you’re one of the Left­Be­hinds? You’d get all sweaty like the guys in the Chick tracts.

    And in case you hadn’t heard, Harold Camp­ing took another look at his cal­cu­la­tions (I’ll bet!) and dis­cov­ered that he had mis­cal­cu­lated by five months. So now the world will end on Octo­ber 21.

    Maybe it’s just tacky to even bring it up, but don’t we kind of think that the Protes­tants have a prob­lem where all of this stuff is con­cerned? Because even if the Rap­ture didn’t hap­pen this time, their the­ol­ogy — as I under­stood it when I was a Protes­tant, any­way — has a “Rapture-shaped” hole in it.

    Here’s the talk­ing points ver­sion:

    1. You are saved by affirm­ing Jesus Christ as your Lord and Sav­ior. You are thereby assured of sal­va­tion and heaven.
    2. Because of that, the rest of your life after your con­ver­sion is basi­cally down­time. You don’t need to learn any­thing, because learn­ing is over­rated and God is unknow­able any­way. You don’t need to repent of any­thing, because you’re going to heaven. You don’t need to do any­thing — in fact, you bet­ter not! — because works are dead.
    3. Suf­fer­ing is for sin­ners, so they can reach the point of conversion.
    4. You’re not a sinner.
    5. There’s going to be a ter­ri­ble time of suf­fer­ing before Jesus Christ returns.

    Adding that up, I don’t see how Protes­tants wouldn’t believe that they’d be snatched out of all the bad­ness before it hap­pens. It doesn’t make any sense for God to afflict them when they’ve already said The Prayer and signed The Pledge.

    So my ques­tion to Protes­tants who say they don’t believe in the Rap­ture is “Why not?” And my ques­tion to those who believe in the Rap­ture is “What are you going to do if you’re wrong?”

    I may sound like I’m just being irrev­er­ent, but I don’t mean to be. This is a really seri­ous issue, because Church his­tory reflects a num­ber of times that believ­ers decided the Sec­ond Com­ing was immi­nent, and the after­math of that antic­i­pa­tion never went well for the Church (think of last Saturday’s dis­ap­point­ment to the tenth power). I think there’s a whole pop­u­la­tion of vague Chris­tians that signed on as a kind of celes­tial life insur­ance, and I don’t know what hap­pens to them if it turns out that God doesn’t respect the contract.

    Just won­der­ing. Gives me some­thing to do until Octo­ber 21, right?

    Pic­tures:
    Banner/Above: “Woman with a Milk Jug” by Jan Ver­meer
    Home­page: “Woman with a Pearl Neck­lace” by Jan Vermeer

     


    Related posts:

    1. Save the date: Rap­ture will come Saturday
    2. For­give­ness again
    3. Inward peace
    4. The dis­hon­esty of atheism
    5. They see your heart

    May 24th, 2011 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Cha 05.24.2011

    Not sure what denom­i­na­tion of Protes­tant you were before you were received into Ortho­doxy, but none of your talk­ing points reflect the beliefs of my own for­mer body. Not sure it’s fair to lump all Protes­tants into one bundle.

  • MzEllen

    Romans 11

    Women received back their dead by res­ur­rec­tion. Some were tor­tured, refus­ing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a bet­ter life. Oth­ers suf­fered mock­ing and flog­ging, and even chains and impris­on­ment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, des­ti­tute, afflicted, mis­treated— of whom the world was not wor­thy— wan­der­ing about in deserts and moun­tains, and in dens and caves of the earth.

    And all these, though com­mended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had pro­vided some­thing bet­ter for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.

    There will be suf­fer­ing. Scrip­ture tells us of “this age and the age to come” — with­out men­tion­ing a mid­dle age.

  • Nicode­mus

    I would say that Protes­tantism is so broad that it would be dif­fi­cult to sum up in five points. I would agree with Gha that it does not reflect my for­mer Protes­tant church either. Point for point, I would say:

    1. This was def­i­nitely true at my for­mer church — how­ever, not every­one believed in the “once saved, always saved” idea — you could walk away by not affirm­ing Christ as Lord.

    2. The Protes­tants I know are not really like this — they are excited about the faith, they read and study their Bibles, they are doing good works, and they are sin­cere in their pur­suit of God. They do feel bad when they sin, and they do repent and pray with fer­vor to get back on track.

    3 and 4 — None of my Protes­tant friends believe this.

    5. I still believe that is true, espe­cially since all hell does break loose just before the end (accord­ing to 2 Thes­sa­lo­ni­ans 2:1–12.

    Unfor­tu­nately, any kook who is thump­ing a Bible and spout­ing off date-setting and hate-mongering is con­sid­ered “Protes­tant” — the one thing that is preva­lent in the Protes­tant world is inter­pret­ing the Bible as you see fit, and that of course causes a plethora of belief sys­tems, even between well-known and estab­lished Protes­tant groups.

  • Grace

    Well, I’m feel­ing con­victed that I wasn’t being very fair with my glib, reduc­tion­ist take on the the­ol­ogy. I’ll break it out in a new post how I got there. But I think I apol­o­gize every time I get into this stuff, so I should prob­a­bly stay out of it.

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required